Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Non-mint)

Alexndra Lange

Hardcover | 16.64 x 3.05 x 24.13 cm | 320 pp

Bloomsbury | 2022 | 9781635576023

Few places have been as nostalgised, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall’s appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping centre has become one of our era’s defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumours of its demise been greatly exaggerated?

Alexandra Lange chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange’s perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion – of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall’s story of rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards

“A smart and accessible cultural history.” Los Angeles Times

“A fantastic examination of what became the mall … envision[ing] a more meaningful public afterlife for our shopping centers.” Vulture

A portrait – by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving – of one of America’s most iconic institutions, from an author who “might be the most influential design critic writing now” LARB

PLEASE NOTE: This book is a NON-MINT item. NON-MINT books are new but are either ex-display copies or warehouse marked – minor cosmetic imperfections such as scuffs, marks, or minor dents to the covers.